


your echo is louder than your voice

by ThatAloneOne



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, F/F, Swords, post-gideon the ninth, the only Harrow the Ninth information this draws from is the cover art
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:06:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25704838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/pseuds/ThatAloneOne
Summary: It would have been easier if she never saw a trace of Gideon at all.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 16
Kudos: 50





	your echo is louder than your voice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Queerantine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queerantine/gifts).



> Title is a quote from "Dulcinea", in conversation with Harrow.
> 
> Mentions of unhealthy eating habits, Big Depression, and slight horror/gore similar to the books.
> 
> Gifted to the person that made me read Gideon, how dare they make me get so invested in this.

It would have been easier if she never saw a trace of Gideon at all. 

* * *

Gideon hadn’t appeared in the mirror when Harrow had finally found the stomach to look. Harrow didn’t have Gideon’s golden eyes, the way that Cytherea had worn blue eyes that weren’t her own. Cytherea had been cobbled together and bubbling over with death and Harrow wasn’t. She was alive, and Gideon was not. Harrow was wholly herself, no matter how much she felt like a monster wrapped in the skin of who she had been. It made Gideon feel gone, vanished, like Harrow had swallowed her and burned Gideon’s shining soul to ash. 

It would have been better if she could see the remnants outright, see Gideon’s ghost in flashes of red hair and snatches of laughter. It would have been better if it was Gideon’s hand painting a lopsided skull on in the mornings, because then she would _know_. Harrow painted her face as she always had, and it looked like it always had. There was nothing of Gideon in it, though Gideon had once worn the same paint. It would have been easier if she could stare in the mirror and see Gideon’s reflection instead of her own. 

_A necromancer alone couldn’t do it_ , Harrow had said a thousand years ago, when Gideon was still real and warm and grinning like a fiend. She had meant that with Gideon, she could do anything. 

Harrow wished for dirt and blood beneath her fingernails, like she could dig up Gideon’s skeleton back in the Ninth, for it to open its gaping jaw and say, _I’m gone, it’s over, you’re alone_. 

* * *

Harrow was wholly herself except for the moments when she wasn’t. 

* * *

Some mornings, her knee and wrist ached, the way they might have for Gideon as she healed. She walked differently now. More forward, her weight on the balls of her feet like she was ready to run. Once she _had_ run, her hand anchored on the pommel of the blade at her hip. In the blast of adrenaline as the Necrolord’s ship fell away beneath her feet she could have sworn she heard Gideon’s whoop of joy. 

It had probably just been her. All the screaming was these days. 

* * *

Harrowhark Nonagesimus was the last of the Ninth, all of its two hundred and one children bundled inside the hollow ache of her ribcage. Everything else of the Ninth was gone. Ortus and Glaurica were dust amongst the stars the same way the rest of the aged Ninth population was waiting its turn to join the dark of the crypt. The Necrolord had promised to renew her house but Harrow didn’t know if there was anything left to renew it from. 

* * *

Harrow had never appreciated just how much Gideon _had_ studied with her swords. She’d whined about leaving behind her precious two-hander, but she had learned the rapier well. Now Harrow’s hands held the knowledge of them both, to her undying shame. She wasn’t enough to carry the weight of Gideon, let alone her sword. 

She had pledged herself as Lyctor to the Emperor Undying and this was what his Lyctors did. They wore their rapiers and they fought with them, no matter how impractical it was. They were undying, besides Cytherea and the others that nobody talked about, visible in the gaps painted between words of Lyctoral victories. There was only so much you could change once you were-

Unchanging, eternal, deathless and gut-wrenchingly never alone. The cavaliers had trained with a rapier so that their necromancer could stitch the two of them together and hold up a sword with their faltering grip. The eternal weakness of necromancy lingered in the Lyctors and so it lingered in their flimsy swords, no matter how impractical they were for the war. 

But Gideon-

The rapier was too light in Harrow’s hand, even as her arm ached. She caught herself, again and again, cupping the bottom of the hilt in her opposite palm. The first time it happened Harrow had been dry-retching for hours and glad of her perpetually empty stomach. The fourth time it happened, Harrow left the rapier on the floor where her numb fingers had dropped it. 

No matter how many odd looks she got from the fellow Lyctors, she never used it again. 

* * *

Two hundred had always been too large a number to comprehend. One was easy. One was Gideon, unforgivably devoured. 

She had chosen this when she had sent Crux to fetch Gideon. She had chosen this when she had abandoned Gideon to chase the mystery of Canaan House. She had chosen this when she had read the letter from the Necrolord that’d promised the return of the necromancers with the same fervour as it refrained from mentioning what would happen to the cavs. 

* * *

Doing up the buckle of the broadsword’s scabbard belt was easy. Harrow’s hands knew more than she did, these days, and they had the scabbard sitting in place on her hip almost before she’d decided to strap it on. The trouble came when she shifted her weight, unused to the heavy press of leather, uncomfortable with the way it lay so close to the bone when- when-

The tip of Gideon’s sword scraped the dirt, the top of the scabbard vibrating against her hipbone. “Sorry,” she said, without thinking, to an Agliamene who wasn’t there to yell at her for blunting the tip of her sword by wearing it too soon, before she was tall enough to do it properly. 

Harrow wore Gideon’s sword buckled on her back after that, no matter how difficult that made it to draw.

* * *

Cytherea’s cavalier had gone willingly, but even ten thousand years later her eyes had been wild in Cythera’s face. Cytherea’s other half hadn’t fought the joining the same way that Naberius roiled within Ianthe even now, but Cytherea had spat something about the pain of centuries. In comparison, Gideon lying dormant stuck out like a sore thumb. To the other Lyctors it looked like all of the power with none of the price.

On her clearer days, Harrow thought of Gideon as she had last seen her, rolling up her sleeves with shaking hands and looking like she’d discovered the deepest secret the universe had to offer. Cythera’s cavalier may well have sacrificed herself willingly, but Gideon had done it herself. Gideon had wanted Harrow’s life more than she wanted her own. 

When anyone else said it, she raged, but on the nights when the Necrolord’s ship slid past sheets of stars, she thought distantly that Gideon had found peace curled in the nest of Harrow’s ribcage. 

* * *

The worst of it was the night Harrow felt Gideon and it hadn’t been real. She had been stripping her armour for the usual attempt at sleep and a hand against her bare arm startled her into stillness. It felt like Gideon’s hand, rough with sword calluses and heavy with exhaustion. The calluses had been the only thing Harrow had really coveted of Gideon’s, back in the early days of her Lyctorhood, if only so that she wouldn’t have to wear her own hands raw. 

But then Harrow looked down, and saw nothing but her own hand. The spread of calluses was wrong — Gideon’s hands had been broader and so her beloved sword had mapped their hands differently. 

The grief was worse when it was simple. Harrow was missing Gideon the way anyone would have missed anyone else when they were dead and gone. No ghosts. No echoes. Just a hand-me-down sword that would never suit her as well as it had suited Gideon, and enough regret to blot out the sun.   
  
Gideon had never known a Harrow with calloused hands and a knot of muscle at her shoulder where the scabbard rested. Gideon never would. Harrow laid her unfamiliar hands in her lap and finally, truly, felt alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hadn't read any of Harrow when I wrote this — it's all from the cover and summary. I've read it now though!
> 
> You can find me on tumblr or dreamwidth as writerproblem193!


End file.
